Overhauling the Auction House system

[Nasibihc]

There has been many posts about players being forced to stand by their retainer bell to fight against undercutting and a lot of people including me have been annoyed by this. There are also bots that scan the prices on the Market Board 24/7 to ensure that their item stays as the lowest price that's currently available by undercutting the lowest prices with 1 gil or 1000 gil.

The fact is that the Market Board needs a change!

I started thinking about how to make the market board function so that it'd give the player freedom to enjoy the game content without having to worry about getting their items sold.

So I started putting AH/listings models from different games up for investigation.

Let's start with the FFXI auction house I remember from the days I still used to play the game. The AH only showed up the last price the item was sold for, but not the prices that the items were currently being sold at. So people had to kind of guess the price that they were wanting to buy the item. Although this resulted in people spamming the price from the "impossible low" to upwards until they got the lowest price on the said item. This was still a better system than the current one in FFXIV. Now don't smite me if the AH system had changes after that in XI, that's how I remember it being.

GW2 has an auction house type of service that has a listing fee which is based on how much you put the item up for. If you want to change the listing price, you will lose the fee that you had to pay for putting it up.



Now what we could do is make a system that combines these both with the following qualities:

1. You list an item to the auction house and you have to pay a fee of 30% of the items price you list it up for before you can put it up on sale.

2. If you decide to change your listed price on the item, you will lose the fee you had to pay. This will prevent the abusive undercutting trend on the system.

3. The items have a 24 hour selling time and after that they will automatically return to your "sales box" which holds the items you had on sale. This box has shared item slots on the ones you have up for sale. For example if you have 20 slots of items in sale, you have to have 0 slots free in your sales box. 19 items in sale/1 slot free in sales box 18/2 etc.. also the amount of gil that you receive from your items takes up 1 slot from the sales box. You can withdraw it by clicking on it and after that it goes to your wallet.

4. If the item does not get sold, you will get your 30% fee back from the item listing price after the time expires and the item is returned to the sales box.

5. If the item gets sold, you will get your 30% fee back, but the item transaction fee will still be paid normally.

6. The system would not list the prices like it does now where you can see the prices people have their stuff up for sale. So like in XI you have to guess a bit how much you bid for it. In addition to this the system does not update the last sold items immediately to the sales tracker, but instead it updates the the mean or median of the prices that the item has sold for the past 24 hours once in 24 hours. Mean or median have their own good and bad sides. If an item gets sold for 1 gil it will distort the mean values much, but if the median is used the far values hold little importance to the listed price and won't distort it so much. Of course the other option is to list the 10 latest sales with their exact prices from 24 hours, but I personally would prefer the mean/median system.

7. Let's say person A puts up the item for sale for 6700 gil and person B puts the item on sale for 7700 gil, the last known price for the item has been 8000 gil. A bidder comes and pays 7100 gil for the item. Person A's item will get sold, because the bidders price was closer to his price than it was for person B and also the bidder couldn't afford person B's item, so it rounds the bids downwards to the closest possible price. The bidder will pay the full 7100 gil price, however person A will only get 6700 gil minus the transaction fee off the item. What happened to the 400 gil then? It went to the market service as spoils of marketing. This is not only good for the idea that it'd ensure a bit of randomness with the items getting sold for each person, but it would also greatly reduce the amount of Gil that is circulating in the economy of the servers, which is a really good thing that SE wants as well. No player would benefit or get disadvantage from this, the only factor that benefits from this is the economy.

8. The items bidding price has to be greater than or exactly the listed lowest price on that item for the item to get sold.

9. If players spam for the "lowest price" it doesn't matter, since the latest prices aren't listed immediately. The transactions are secret until the daily update on transactions from the last 24 hours, so there is a chance for other players items to get sold as well. Of course there could be a penalty or a disadvantage of spamming low bids, such as limiting the number of bids you can do per 15min to an hour, but I couldn't think of a good way to make this work. Since some items need to be off the auction house immediately, a waiting period on bidding again would be too harsh.


Any thoughts and suggestions regarding this idea are warmly welcome!!


Post script:

There are probably many flaws with this, but it's 4:50 a.m and my brain isn't functioning properly to think of everything, but hey it's the middle of the night and this seemed like a great idea so I came here to post it \/

I will update this thread with possible suggestions/ideas from all of you who took time to read this

Updated: Changed the terminology. However I still can't edit the topic itself, so bear with it. I know it's a market board. When I was writing this it was so late and I was tired so the term "Auction house" I have always used off any market place in any game. However the main point in the post stays the same.

Thank you!

[Shneibel]

it does some how sound like an "I dont like undercuting thread" , after read from 1 to 5. From 6 to 9, add in a player request buy system is not better ? as in player put the price they want to pay for an item, and the seller can sell direct to the buyer with that price.

In any case, I don't feel player need to be punish because of some other ppl undercut, let's say in a scenario :Player A set a weapon on sale, a FC memeber say he is looking for that say weapon, Player A then take the weapon off the MB and give to his FC member, abd BAM lost 30% of his gil for being a good fellow, you got what I mean ?

[LalaRu]

When listing fees are in effect, the result is have all available chat options flooded by sell this, buy that lines. Better not.

But a little adjustment as being unable to sell in AH with prices lower or equal the NPC buy price, or higher than NPC sell (when item available for purchase from npc), will:

• helps to cleanup the AH by tons of pure garbage put there
• less stress on servers for AH database queries
• save users from being scammed to buy at 50k things that are on npc at 20k (uhmmm... )

[Ashkendor]

The fact is that AH needs a change!

I don't see how this is a fact at all. It would have been more accurate to say that in your opinion it needs a change.

I'm perfectly fine with the current auction house system. If you know how to use it, you can profit quite nicely.

[Delsus]

Whenever we can see the current price for items it will be undercut, fact.

Using the fee system can be exploited, just put another, identical item up, and wait for your item to be returned (so rather than selling a 99 stack of an item, sell a 33 stack, if that's undercut, put another 33 up, and another undercutting each time, once one hasn't sold and is returned put it back up.)

FFXI's AH was extremely easy to manipulate, showing a history of I think it was the last 10 items sold, you just need to either out some up for 1 gil (or your own price) and buy it back, do this 10 times and no one knows the current value of the item, to make people not realize you are manipulating the AH you could get friends and LS members in and all buy from each other.

The only defence against manipulation of the AH in FFXI was the fact we had FFXIAH, they had to get permission off SE to poll the AH (anything else and the only way to do it would to have a bot scanning the AH, which was against ToS) so unless SE allowed it in FFXIV that would not work.

The fact is when you have a player controlled market, people will always find ways to undercut and manipulate the market, no matter what SE does.

[SinisterIsBack]

it does some how sound like an "I dont like undercuting thread" , after read from 1 to 5. From 6 to 9, add in a player request buy system is not better ? as in player put the price they want to pay for an item, and the seller can sell direct to the buyer with that price.

In any case, I don't feel player need to be punish because of some other ppl undercut, let's say in a scenario :Player A set a weapon on sale, a FC memeber say he is looking for that say weapon, Player A then take the weapon off the MB and give to his FC member, abd BAM lost 30% of his gil for being a good fellow, you got what I mean ?

Everquest has an AH like XIV's but also has a barter system in place where buyers can post prices they are willing to pay with an amount of items they want and the seller can sell directly to the buyer. Its nice


A big turn off for me is the triple fee system we got going on, its stupid as hell.

[Barboron]

The fact is that AH needs a change!

I don't even have to read your post to assume you are from FFXI. To put it simply, everything you said is just wrong. Here's why...we don't even have an auction house in this game.

[Kimikryo]

I'd like to have a system thats a mix of FFXI and WoW

WoWs auction house system was an auction house had a starting price and a sell out price. People are able to bid on items, when someone outbid them they got the money returned. In FFXI you saw what the last few prices were, now you could guess by "bidding" lower and higher until you get the item you wanted.

Now it seems like a badly regulated Marketplace. Everybody puts up their wares with prices, someone wants to sell faster and sells ridiculously low. In the real world, on big official market places, there are regulations that say "Don't break the market by being ridiculous cheap" Which doesn't say undercutting is forbidden, just don't sell something for 10 bucks when the normal price is somewhere between 800-1000 bucks.

I am against fees for putting something up. Just imagine you make a small mistake, that would be a punishment for you. Someone doing that on purpose would do it either way, because they just don't care.

[Waeksyn]

The current system is just a game implementation of a reverse auction and it works just fine. The only thing I would change is the confusing fees.

[Nasibihc]

it does some how sound like an "I dont like undercuting thread" , after read from 1 to 5. From 6 to 9, add in a player request buy system is not better ? as in player put the price they want to pay for an item, and the seller can sell direct to the buyer with that price.

In any case, I don't feel player need to be punish because of some other ppl undercut, let's say in a scenario :Player A set a weapon on sale, a FC memeber say he is looking for that say weapon, Player A then take the weapon off the MB and give to his FC member, abd BAM lost 30% of his gil for being a good fellow, you got what I mean ?

Well I'm quite sure nobody likes undercutting, some just haven't had a problem with it. Yeah it could be good that if there was a system where people who want to buy the items put up an add and then the sellers could just take up on those and get their items sold, it's something to add to a more functioning system. What it comes to the giving weapon off to your FC member, well, then he'd just have to wait until to tomorrow to get it or a special ticket that lets you remove 1 item off the AH without the penalty in a week/month.

Whenever we can see the current price for items it will be undercut, fact.

Using the fee system can be exploited, just put another, identical item up, and wait for your item to be returned (so rather than selling a 99 stack of an item, sell a 33 stack, if that's undercut, put another 33 up, and another undercutting each time, once one hasn't sold and is returned put it back up.)
FFXI's AH was extremely easy to manipulate, showing a history of I think it was the last 10 items sold, you just need to either out some up for 1 gil (or your own price) and buy it back, do this 10 times and no one knows the current value of the item, to make people not realize you are manipulating the AH you could get friends and LS members in and all buy from each other.

The only defence against manipulation of the AH in FFXI was the fact we had FFXIAH, they had to get permission off SE to poll the AH (anything else and the only way to do it would to have a bot scanning the AH, which was against ToS) so unless SE allowed it in FFXIV that would not work.

The fact is when you have a player controlled market, people will always find ways to undercut and manipulate the market, no matter what SE does.

This is why the price update estimate is only once a day, not immediately like they did in XI. A player can't see the current prices that the items are going for, that's why the mean/median system only gives an estimate of what the items current ongoing price is, so you really don't know what to undercut. A median system PREVENTS people from putting up 10 times 1 gil items even at the very last second of the sales in the purpose of "clearing the board". That's why it will negate all the off values that aren't near the trending price. My idea was that it couldn't be manipulated with this rule in effect.

I don't even have to read your post to assume you are from FFXI. To put it simply, everything you said is just wrong. Here's why...we don't even have an auction house in this game.

Don't come and shout at other tables if you really have nothing to say

I'd like to have a system thats a mix of FFXI and WoW

WoWs auction house system was an auction house had a starting price and a sell out price. People are able to bid on items, when someone outbid them they got the money returned. In FFXI you saw what the last few prices were, now you could guess by "bidding" lower and higher until you get the item you wanted.

Now it seems like a badly regulated Marketplace. Everybody puts up their wares with prices, someone wants to sell faster and sells ridiculously low. In the real world, on big official market places, there are regulations that say "Don't break the market by being ridiculous cheap" Which doesn't say undercutting is forbidden, just don't sell something for 10 bucks when the normal price is somewhere between 800-1000 bucks.

I am against fees for putting something up. Just imagine you make a small mistake, that would be a punishment for you. Someone doing that on purpose would do it either way, because they just don't care.

Maybe a system where you will put your item on sale for 24 to 48 hours and you will also put a minimum amount of gil you want for the item and that listed price is just hidden from others. People can make bids on the item until the time runs out and whatever the highest offer is wins the item. If there are multiple of the same items in sale it will just simply place the bid randomly on one that the bid fits in to. If multiple bids are put on the said item, it will put the bids until each one has at least one bid, and it will do this over and over again until the time runs out. The bids that are placed on the items "distribute" randomly & evenly at the same time so no one is being put off on sales.